A wave rolls, like a lumbering seal. The sea is a stretch of grey mounds and I wait for the next one; lazy, easy, barely moving. How I envy it. The water swells like a soft inhalation and yawns up the beach. Sums up Clenton-On-Sea, really. My head’s banging. I got up at the crack […]

October floated like a glacier into town. Abigail remembered the chill from her childhood, but memory alone could never summon its sensate richness: the sawdust-dry air, the biting wind that snaked up your sleeves no matter how you held your arms and the leaves that crunched like brittle insecurities at every step. No form of […]

Staff Notice Above all else, maintenance of the Plate Policy is critical. It is imperative not only for the smooth running of the breakfast service but also in setting a moral standard. When moral standards are allowed to slip in any group of individuals thrown together through necessity rather than choice, it brews unrest and, […]

I sit inside and wait for summer to be over. Sometimes I sit upright in bed and read a book. Fully dressed though, as if I were about to go out. It’s all too easy to fall the long, hard way into bad habits. Sometimes I sit in the bath, the water cool on my […]

I swayed in rhythm, holding her head against my shoulder. One hand stroked the long black hair, the other held a wine glass steady. The song coming out of my brand-new vintage-style record player was slow, sappy, somewhat crooning. A song pulled from her music library that, if I was being honest, she had liked […]

Matthew Hole has been many things and he’s kept his eyes and ears open the whole time. He currently lives in the West Country of England, where he grew up, but has a history of not sitting still. He’s lived in capital cities (London, Rome) and little villages (Trull, England; Lousa, Portugal) and regularly potters […]

By day, Cleo is a current MSc Business with Marketing student at the University of Warwick. By night, she is a writer. She graduated from the University of Exeter with a first-class BA with honours in English in 2019. Her work often draws upon the dark in the mundane, and she finds it most interesting […]

Nicola Young is a former student of Psychology, Philosophy and English Literature, and a current cog in the great journalism-publishing machine. She grew up in Oregon, but has since lived in Washington, DC, Spain, Boston MA, and now Austin TX. Like most writers, she wrote her first short story as a small child. The earliest […]

James Ellis is a full-time writer. He has written two novels, The Wrong Story and Happy Family, and has published a number of prize-winning short stories, a travelogue of his journey through Central America and a monthly column for The Gudgeon. James also develops and delivers workshops for fiction writers and is a regular speaker at writers’ events. James has an MSt […]

Holly Sykes is a writer and a secondary school teacher of English. Having taught in London for ten years, she is now back in the north-west where she grew up. For one day each week, when she is not teaching in a school on the Wirral, she sits in a quiet room with a blanket […]